Many Years of Poems

The urge to cut myself is getting stronger. I thought about checking myself into the hospital but I probably can't do that because people need me at home.

I don't want to move, except to hurt myself. I just want some way to make this pain go away.

I'm in a better mood than I was yesterday. The urges to cut have subsided, and I just generally feel better, so that's good.

I'm a little bored though.

I slept for a really long time. I went to bed just to lie down, not to sleep, around 6:30 last night and fell asleep and stayed that way until Cliff woke me up when he came to bed and made me take my night meds. I got up and smoked a cig but went back to bed and stayed there until around 10 this morning.

I had a weird dream about helping break the hold of a bullshitting preacher on an unsuspecting church. I haven't been to church in years; why I would dream about it is unfathomable. Unless of course, Nancy's bullshitting friends are the preacher and Nancy is the church.

I have a nasty infected bug bite on my right middle finger. It hurts. I shouldn't have scratched it open and let it get infected though, so it's my own fault.

In other news, Mike and Charlie are going to get themselves a doggie friend. I've been pinging on Mike for a while about getting a pet because he's prone to depression and anxiety like I am, and pets can be such a wonderful comfort when you're feeling down. They seem to know when you feel bad and hang out with you and want you to pet them. Plus the responsibility of taking care of a pet can get you up in the morning when you feel so bad you want to stay in bed. I'm trying to persuade them to get a shelter dog; it will be less expensive than a pedigree dog and probably a better pet. And most shelters these days make sure the pets are inoculated and spayed or neutered as applicable, so you don't have to worry about that. They've just now gone out to lunch and to the pet store to look at dog supplies.

We have two cats and a dog; the cats are just ordinary domestic shorthair tabby cats. One is a ginger tabby named Tessa and the other is a brown tabby named Sweetie Pie. The dog is a Labrador/American Staffordshire Terrier mix named CC. He looks like a smallish blond Lab.

Anyway, I just wanted to let people know that no, I didn't cut myself yesterday as much as I wanted to, and no, I didn't check myself into the hospital for wanting to cut myself so badly.

Cliff is home from work; he had a late call so he didn't get off work at 7 like he was supposed to; he got off work around 8 and we didn't get home until almost 9. He stayed up for a while playing around on the computer and then decided to take a nap.

Mike was online earlier but has stepped out. I don't know where Kevin (of Stupid Friggin Wacko fame) is; he hasn't been on since the chat transcript I posted yesterday.

I'm lonely. I'm tempted to go snuggle Cliff just to feel less lonely, not because I want to go to bed right now.

I've been feeling the crawly sensations on my skin again when there's nothing there. I don't like that feeling. It makes me want to scratch my skin off.

I finally washed my hair last night after leaving it unwashed for two weeks and two days. Yuck. It was greasy and yucky and needed a wash. Why do I do that to myself? What makes me think I shouldn't take care of my body? And I love my hair. It's my favorite thing about my body. So what is making me not take care of it?

I had to reschedule my counseling appointment (AGAIN) because I don't have the money to pay for it but I will next week, so I'll go then. I really need to go. I haven't been since right before the last time I was in the hospital.

I probably also need to see my psychiatrist about the crawly feelings and the ongoing depression and anxiety. I don't think my meds are really cutting it any more. But I can't make an appointment with her until I pay for the last two appointments. I swear I paid for the one in January but I can't find the receipt and they say I didn't pay so I have to pay again, and then I also have to pay for the one in April.

Why are things really only okay for a little while? I felt all right in April and then all of a sudden I fell apart completely and wound up in the hospital again because I thought I was going to take my sharpest kitchen knife and gash my arms open until I bled all over everywhere. I really wanted to; I wanted to hurt myself, and I wanted to see the blood, lots and lots of blood. It was very disturbing and upsetting.

I kind of want to hurt myself now; I wish I had a razor blade to make little cuts with, just lots of little cuts. Razor blades are comforting for the little cuts, and it's so easy to make little cuts with a razor blade.

Nancy is such an inconsiderate little pain in the ass; she doesn't think about anybody but herself. She's upsetting her mother and her brother, and all this bullshit drama she and her pissant motherfucker friends have been causing isn't doing me any good either.

Delayed reactions strike again; I'm finally breaking down from all the stress over Nancy.

Mike's back online, so at least I have someone to talk to now. Now I'll feel a little less lonely. Still depressed and anxious, but less lonely.

Well, I had a panic attack last night but Cliff calmed me out of it. I actually feel better for just having the damn thing and getting it over with.

I guess sometimes you just need an emotional release.

I really felt like cutting myself but had nothing to do it with.

Cliff says I'm not trying to get better because I'm not exercising or taking walks or anything, but his doctor just got on his case today about his cholesterol, which is on the low side of high, and his "good" cholesterol is lower than they'd like it to be. (All his other labs came back fine.) So we're going to start taking a walk together in the evening after it cools off; put the puppy dog on his leash and take a little walk around the neighborhood together. His doctor wants him to walk, so we'll walk.

We like his new doctor; he's very thorough and listens to what you have to say. He wants Cliff to see a cardiologist because he doesn't like the EKG they did in the office last week, so I have to call the cardiologist and make an appointment to see him/her. He's afraid Cliff has had a mild heart attack and didn't know it. He also wants Cliff to start taking low-dose aspirin and is putting him on a statin to fix the cholesterol problem. He was sufficiently cool to give us this neat little package that includes a coupon for the first prescription free, and $50 off the next two prescriptions, so assuming the coupons and the health insurance can be used together, we won't have to pay for his first three months of the cholesterol med. The doctor is very pro-active; he looks for everything that might possibly be wrong and wants to fix it before it's a big problem. We like this a lot. I also like that he really listens to the patient and pays attention to what they have to say. I think that makes for an effective doctor.

Cliff has to have a sleep study because we suspect he has sleep apnea. We saw the sleep doctor yesterday, and he thinks Cliff may have sleep apnea, so it's not just my imagination that he stops breathing in his sleep.

So things are starting to look up. All I need is the disability to come through and I'll be a much more relaxed person, I think. Much less of a stress ball.

I'm feeling very anxious again. I feel lonely and sad. I kept pinching and biting myself in my room so I came to write for a while.

I took my anti-anxiety medicines but nothing seems to calm me down lately. I just feel terrible, frightened and anxious and unable to be calm.

I want to cut myself just to get the pain out, but I don't have anything to cut myself with since Cliff took away my razor blades. The kitchen knives are not sharp enough and I'd get caught if I tried to get one of them to cut myself with.

I can't go anywhere because we have no money; there's no place I can go to escape. The hell is inside me and it goes where I go.

I want to cry but I can't.

I feel like tearing myself apart, like climbing out of my skin. I don't want to be me any more.

Well, Wednesday night, every time I closed my eyes, I saw myself slashing my arms open with a kitchen knife. It scared me enough that I signed into the hospital and I just got home an hour or so ago.

The doctor in the hospital added BuSpar to my med regimen, but I've got to wait until Cliff gets paid again to fill the prescription.

I feel better now. I'm not so anxious and scared, so the hospital helped.

I have now been awake for something approaching 24 hours. I should be dead to the world, all warm and snuggly in my bed with my honey.

My entire body is stiff and will not relax. My mind will not shut up; thoughts are bouncing around in my head like those bouncy balls I used to buy out of gumball machines when I was a kid and drive my mother insane with by bouncing them in her kitchen while she was trying to cook.

I feel like I'm on the edge of a precipice, like something is about to fall out of me and I'm tensed against it.

I don't think my muscles were this contracted in labor, but it's been almost 16 years so maybe my memory is faulty on that count.

I want to cry but the only tears I get are the tears that come out when I yawn. For whatever bizarre biochemical reason, my eyes tear up when I yawn; everybody thinks I'm crying and I'm not. It's just that I yawned. My eyes have always done that and I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why.

Am I avoiding sleep to avoid nightmares? Am I about to remember something new?

I'm safe now. I have a roof over my head and food on my table and a man who worships the ground I walk on.

So maybe my mind is going to release something that it didn't feel safe releasing before?

I got all righteously angry earlier over a post in survivors about "Christians" trying to force a survivor to forgive her assailant. That shit pisses me off but fast.

Then I got all righteously angry about the "false memory syndrome" idiots as you saw in my previous post.

So maybe I'm just too pissed off to sleep.

Not that righteous anger isn't a good cleansing sort of anger, and I tend to get that way in defense of other survivors. I get all mama-tiger and GRRRRRR at the people who would re-victimize someone who's doing his or her damnedest to heal.

(a few hours later)

Now I'm just awake. I'm not as tense as I was, but I still don't feel like I can go to sleep. I'm plenty tired, but it's like I'm afraid to try to sleep.

When I picked up Cliff from work this morning, he was sleepy too, and we got in bed together and snuggled and had sex. For the first time in a while I had to remind myself that it was Cliff touching me and not my dad. I snuggled up to him afterward and smelled him and it was okay. The smell of his hair comforts me; I like his shampoo.

Maybe I'm triggered by all the posts I read in survivors yesterday and that's why I can't sleep. Hypervigilant, which I'm always guilty of.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I was on such an even keel and now it seems to be all out of whack.

I really want a cigarette but I can't have one. I have to learn some other coping mechanism than polluting my lungs.

I thought I was okay.

I thought I was tougher than this.

I want to cut myself but that shouldn't be an option either. While probably less harmful in the long run than smoking, I shouldn't be doing it. But part of me is saying, just a little cut and you'll feel better. A little bit of blood and you'll know you're real.

Part of me wants to scream and cry for no apparent reason whatsoever. I thought I was past the screaming and crying stage.

I know what happened to me. Maybe not all of it, but I know. I own my life. My father molested and raped me for years until I got up the guts to tell my mother what he was doing and she put a stop to that so fast it probably made his head spin. He terrorized me with his alcoholism and unpredictable temper until I was afraid to defy him at all, and then he used his power to take my innocence and shatter my psyche. I know what happened to me.

And I know what my first husband did. He isolated me from my friends, controlled the way I dressed and looked, disparaged my family, and raped me when I was crying "No" and pushing him away. I know what happened to me.

And intellectually I know I didn't deserve it.

But I feel deeply cracked by it all. Damaged down to the core of my self. Broken in ways that may never be fixed.

I wonder why anybody loves me, much less loves me as much as Cliff does, and I'm afraid to fully trust in that love because love and pain walk hand in hand so much of the time.

I tell myself when I'm with Cliff, "He loves you and he won't hurt you. He loves you and he won't hurt you."

Maybe I just need to go hold my teddy bear and have a good cry. Maybe then I could sleep. Right now I feel so upset and panicky that I can't relax enough to sleep.

I'm really depressed again right now. I keep having to fight the urge to cut myself and I don't know how much longer I can keep from doing it. I tried to do it earlier today but the knife was too dull to cut through my skin, so it just left a little red mark from where I tried to get it to cut through.

I wish I could just stay in bed and hug my teddy bear and have my honey hold me. That's all I really want to do right now.

Days like today I feel like there is no way I'll ever be okay.

There is no time in my life when I was okay, really. Everything was messed up from the beginning, as near as I can tell.

My medications don't seem to be working. I still see shadows and bugs and I feel things crawling on me, and I hear things sometimes, just noises or whatever that no one else hears, and I feel terribly afraid of everything all the time.

Today was bad.

Nancy took the dog out and the damn dog slipped the leash, so Cliff was mad at her for not keeping the leash tight enough and letting him escape, and then she was stupid enough to get into a car with a random guy who claimed to be looking for a lost animal as well. My gods, the girl is nineteen years old and doesn't know better than to get into a car with a stranger?!?!

I felt like cutting today, and/or killing myself, just to make it all stop. I'm so tired of the fears and the memories and just all of it.

I won't do it though; I promised Cliff that I wouldn't, and he promised in return not to let me go back into a bad place like 20th St.

But it doesn't mean I don't feel like it.

I just haven't logged on in a while because I haven't felt like doing anything at all.

I have a project I should be working on, that I promised to do for a friend (it has some benefit for me in it too, possibly involving stable employment by people who understand my medical/emotional issues and won't fire me for missing work). But I just can't make myself do anything.

I'm having to just about force myself to eat most of the time. Food rarely appeals to me any more.

I've been feeling for about 10 days, maybe two weeks, like I'm fighting off a bladder infection; it burns sometimes when I urinate, and sometimes my urine is cloudy. (Unusual for me; I drink enough water to fill a child's paddle-pool, so my urine is usually a clear pale yellow or almost entirely clear.)

So I've been REALLY pushing myself to drink even more water and cranberry juice (I've killed a gallon of cranberry juice in about three or four days). It seems to be helping, but it's a pain in the neck to be going to the bathroom this much.

I also feel like I might be fighting a cold or ear infection or something. My left ear feels full of gunk, and I'm congested. But I'm used to being congested; I live in Florida, which is allergy hell.

And I just have no energy at all. It's an effort to get out of bed, and an effort to get dressed or bathe or do anything at all.

I look at my wrists sometimes and I draw lines on them with my nails, as if I would cut them open. But (probably fortunately) there is no place for me to do that without being caught.

I think of leaving some other way, an overdose or some other sort of poisoning.

I think of leaving without dying, packing up everything and just going somewhere else, leaving everyone in my current life behind.

But I couldn't do that to my daughter, and there are at least two friendships I don't want to leave behind.

I just wish there were some way that I could feel okay.

But I only seem to feel okay for short periods of time.